Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

the block. She never returned, and the next morning her mother contacted the police to report her missing. Police, family, and friends began searching the town and surrounding areas, but they found nothing.

The following Saturday night, one of Lisa’s friends—the best friend of Lisa’s boyfriend, in fact—brought Lisa’s father a pair of familiar-looking pink flip-flops, which he said he’d spotted at an intersection outside town as he was putting up Missing posters. Her sister, Nancy, confirmed that the flip-flops were Lisa’s.

Mr. Rinker rounded up a group of relatives and friends, and the next day they headed out to search the woods near the intersection. The searchers set about their work with a sense of grim foreboding, for the smell of death was in the air, and strong. About sixty yards from the highway guardrail they found Lisa’s body lying in dense underbrush. She was wearing dark blue corduroy jeans with white trim on the pockets—the same pants she’d been wearing the night she disappeared—and a shredded tube top. Her torso was covered with maggots; her face had been eaten away, and so had her internal organs. The skin on her hands and feet had begun to slip, or slough off. Her feet were bare; however, despite the rough terrain and dense underbrush, the soles showed no traces of bruises or scratches. The lack of trauma to the soles, together with a difference in skin color around the toes and arches, suggested that she’d been wearing something on her feet at the time of her death, and possibly for some time afterward as well.

Two days later the local medical examiner performed an autopsy. Because of the advanced state of decomposition and partial skeletonization, he was unable to tell what had killed her. He listed Lisa’s cause of death as undetermined, and her grieving parents buried her.

But the police investigators weren’t ready to put the case to rest. Lisa had quarreled bitterly with her boyfriend, Bernie Woody, on the night she disappeared. According to police, Lisa had been cheating on him—with her own sister’s husband, Dale Robinson—and witnesses had told investigators the boy had threatened her. A car owned by his friend Danny Heath, the fellow who spotted Lisa’s sandals beside the highway, was reported parked beside the road that night near the spot where Lisa’s body was eventually found.

The detectives leaned hard on Lisa’s boyfriend and his pal Danny. During a polygraph test, a police statement said, Danny appeared to be lying when he was asked questions about Lisa’s death. With no cause of death and nothing but circumstantial evidence to suggest that Lisa might have been murdered, though, the district attorney decided not to file criminal charges against either Bernie Woody or Danny Heath.

Meanwhile, a new investigator, Rick Daniele, had become fascinated with the case. Daniele sent photos of the body to Dr. Louise Robbins, a forensic anthropologist in North Carolina, along with the flip-flops found beside the highway. Dr. Robbins, an expert in footprint and shoe print analysis, told Daniele that the discoloration patterns in the forefoot and arch areas indicated that the flip-flops had remained on her feet for several days after she was killed. Dr. Robbins also noticed a piece of sloughed-off skin stuck to one of the flip-flops—further proof that the body was partially decomposed when the sandal was removed.

That’s when Detective Daniele contacted Bill Rodriguez and asked him to analyze the evidence. Besides the photos, he sent Bill soil samples that had been gathered at the death scene, along with preserved maggots that had been collected from Lisa’s body. It was obvious that the investigators had done a thorough job of gathering evidence; it was less obvious, but just as significant, that entomology had become a respected forensic tool, thanks in great measure to Bill’s insect study at the Body Farm five years before.

As Bill leafed through the photos of Lisa’s body, he was struck immediately by the advanced state of decomposition, particularly in the chest region and the hands. Lisa’s face was completely gone, but that wasn’t too surprising: with its moist openings, the face is a blowfly’s preferred place to feed and lay eggs—usually, that is. But not when there’s blood somewhere else on the body.

Any forensic anthropologist who’s seen a victim who’s been stabbed to death or whose throat has been cut knows how dramatically the presence of blood at the sites of those wounds attracts flies and promotes maggot growth. Within days, if the weather is warm—as it was in August of 1984, when Lisa Rinker died—the masses of maggots hatching in the bloody wounds consume the surrounding tissues far faster than they otherwise would. It’s a phenomenon we call “differential decomposition,” which raises a red flag instantly in the mind of any trained forensic scientist.

From the extent of differential decomposition in her chest and abdomen, Bill was virtually sure Lisa had been stabbed there; the damage to the soft tissue of her hands suggested that she’d been cut there, too, probably trying to defend herself. He called Detective Daniele to tell him so.

Armed with Bill’s reading of the photos, Daniele retrieved Lisa’s clothing from the evidence file and sent it to the Virginia crime lab. The crime lab’s analysis bore out Bill’s hunch: tests of eight stained areas of Lisa’s pants indicated the presence of blood—lots of blood, enough to have soaked the fabric. Daniele pleaded with the family and the district attorney to allow Lisa’s body to be exhumed so Bill could examine it for signs of skeletal trauma.

Three months later, on a cold, snowy day in January, Bill arrived at the cemetery where Lisa had been buried. Breaking through the frozen ground, cemetery workers unearthed her coffin and hoisted it out of the ground; then they put it into a hearse for the trip to the Fairfax County morgue. There, Bill removed the chest, abdomen, and both hands, placed them in a large kettle of water, and boiled them for an hour to remove the flesh. Then he